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Topic: another one I don't know. (Read 2531 times)

I kind of feel like I'm involved in a television game show these days. It involves a bunch of paperweights. One is worth thousands of dollars, the others are more valuable if made into windowpanes???

This one strikes me as interesting because the maker somehow got a mirror effect into the weight. At first glance it looks like there is a crack in the paperweight running from the edge of the flower (at least I think it's a flower) all the way to the bottom and extending from the body of the ?flower? to the edge.

On closer examination - it is not a crack per se, as it does not get to the outside surface of the weight. It does create a neato mirror within the paperweight - if you compare the first two pictures you'll see that I rotated the weight enough to move the 'mirror' from one side to the other.

It's a Millville (Whitall Tatum?) "Lily" with an "umbrella" form. The style with the pedestal foot is perhaps the most common version. It could have been made from around the mid 19th century to the 1940s.

Hard to say from the images whether the internal fault is a stress fracture or a large air bubble, but if looks like a crack then that is most likely. Either way, it probably means it is of very little commercial value.

Hi, The "crack" looks exactly like what we get when we have a compatibility problem with different colours in one weight.Whenever it happens to us it tends to be because of the white glass.We did one recently based on the titanic and we had a lot of problems at the start of the run because of the amount of white used for the iceberg part of the design. Allan

Clearly Whital Tatum had the same problem that you describe - the only difference seemingly being that you have chosen to not release your weights to the public until you resolved the problem, while Whital Tatum apparently chose to release their weights. I wonder if they ever did find a repeatable solution.

I would like to copy your explanation to the listing as part of my ongoing efforts to educate the public. Would that be acceptable? If 'yes', would you like attribution?

Hi again, Don, feel free to use my post as you want and it's entirely up to you if you want to attribute it to me;I certainly do not mind either way.I would like to add that the company that made the weight probably did not sell the weight knowing it had a problem as these types of stress cracks can take years to appear.All it would take to start the crack would be someone leaving it on a window ledge in the full sunlight.We get round the problem of stress fractures by simply revising the compatibility of the colours;either by simply buying from a different manufacturer or changing our own glass batch mix.Thankfully we haven't had to do this very often.

P.s. Sorry for making all you kind people get "breathless",I wouldn't want to have to put a health warning on my work :lol: .Seriously, thanks for your nice comments again. Allan